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"Draws upon previously neglected primary sources to offer a ground-breaking analysis of the intertwined political, racial, and religious dynamics at work in the institutional merging of three American Methodist denominations in 1939. Davis boldly examines the conflicted ethics behind a dominant American religious culture's justification and preservation of racial segregation in the reformulation of its post-slavery institutional presence in American society. His work provides a much-needed, critical discussion of the racial issues that pervaded American religion and culture in the early twentieth century.a
--Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, Academic Dean and Associate Professor of History and Theology, United Theological Seminary, Dayton Ohio

aA discerning, sober, and troubling probing of the preoccupation within the Methodist Church with Christian nationalism, civilization as defined by white Anglo-Saxon manhood, and race, race consciousness and athe problem of the Negroa that was foundational to and constitutive of a reunited Methodism. A must read for students of early 20th century America.a
--Russell E. Richey, Emory University

In the early part of the twentieth century, Methodists were seen by many Americans as the most powerful Christian group in the country. Ulysses S. Grant is rumored to have said that during his presidency there were three major political parties in the U.S., if you counted the Methodists.

The Methodist Unification focuses on the efforts among the Southern and Northern Methodist churches to create a unified national Methodist church, and how their plan for unification came to institutionalizeracism and segregation in unprecedented ways. How did these Methodists conceive of what they had just formed as auniteda when members in the church body were racially divided?

Moving the history of racial segregation among Christians beyond a simplistic narrative of racism, Morris L. Davis shows that Methodists in the early twentieth century -- including high-profile African American clergy -- were very much against racial equality, believing that mixing the races would lead to interracial marriages and threaten the social order of American society.

The Methodist Unification illuminates the religious culture of Methodism, Methodists' self-identification as the primary carriers of "American Christian Civilization," and their influence on the crystallization of whiteness during the Jim Crow Era as a legal category and cultural symbol.

Contributions by Jani L. Barker, Rudine Sims Bishop, Julia S. Charles-Linen, Paige Gray, Dianne Johnson-Feelings, Jonda C. McNair, Sara C. VanderHaagen, and Michelle Taylor Watts The Brownies' Book occupies a special place in the history of African American children's literature. Informally the children's counterpart to the NAACP's The Crisis magazine, it was one of the first periodicals created primarily for Black youth. Several of the objectives the creators delineated in 1919 when announcing the arrival of the publication-"To make them familiar with the history and achievements of the Negro race" and "To make colored children realize that being 'colored' is a beautiful, normal thing"-still resonate with contemporary creators, readers, and scholars of African American children's literature. The meticulously researched essays in A Centennial Celebration of "The Brownies' Book" get to the heart of The Brownies' Book "project" using critical approaches both varied and illuminating. Contributors to the volume explore the underappreciated role of Jessie Redmon Fauset in creating The Brownies' Book and in the cultural life of Black America; describe the young people who immersed themselves in the pages of the periodical; focus on the role of Black heroes and heroines; address The Brownies' Book in the context of critical literacy theory; and place The Brownies' Book within the context of Black futurity and justice. Bookending the essays are, reprinted in full, the first and last issues of the magazine. A Centennial Celebration of "The Brownies' Book" illuminates the many ways in which the magazine-simultaneously beautiful, complicated, problematic, and inspiring-remains worthy of attention well into this century.

"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense." - Mark Twain Within your hands is a glimpse into the life, mind, soul, and "truth" of cherished American icon, Mark Twain. This uncensored autobiography is not only a legacy he left behind, but also a gift to all.
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He grew up on the shores of the Mississippi River and took his pen name from the way Mississippi steamboat crews measured the river's depth (the cry "Mark twain " meant the river was at least 12 feet deep and safe to travel).
Twain wrote prolifically, publishing novels, travelogues, newspaper articles, short stories, and political pamphlets. His best-known works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
On the surface, these novels are gripping adventure stories of boys running free on the Mississippi. However, on a deeper level, these novels are also serious works of social criticism. Written while America was still recovering from the Civil War and adjusting to the abolition of slavery, Twain's two best-known Mississippi River adventure tales also measure the depth of America's new economic and social realities.
His most personal and insightful writing came when he created his, "Final (and Right) Plan"-a free-flowing biography of the thoughts and interests he had toward the end of his life as he spoke his "whole frank mind." Along with the plan, came the instruction that the enclosed autobiography writings not be published in book form until 100 years after his death.
Today, we honor the life and writings of Mark Twain by publishing his personal opus-to reacquaint ourselves with the wit, wisdom, and ideals of this legendary American icon.

When asked to name the first ""militant"" Black characters in film, we might imagine Blaxploitation heroes like Sweetback or Shaft. Yet, as this groundbreaking new book shows, there was a much earlier cycle of films featuring militant Black men - many of which were sponsored by the U.S. government. Militant Visions examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw Black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. Elizabeth Reich traces the figure across a wide variety of movie genres, from action blockbusters like Bataan to patriotic musicals like Stormy Weather. In the process, she reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and Black filmmakers. Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic Black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, Black internationalism, and American militarism. She reads the Black soldier in film as inherently transnational, shaped by the displacements of diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of Black artistry and performance. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, it also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself.

English has long emerged as the lingua franca of globalization but has been somehow estranged in the hands or mouths of aliens, from Joseph Conrad to Chang-rae Lee. Haltingly, their alien characters come to speak in the Anglo-American tongue, yet what emerges is skewed by accents, syntax, body language, and nonstandard contextual references-an uncanny, off-kilter language best described as Alienglish.Either an alien's English that estranges or an alienating English because it sounds so natural, it issues forth from an involuntarily forked tongue and split psyche, operating on two registers, one clear and comprehensible, the other occluded and unfamiliar. Alienglish hence diagnoses the literal split in language or the alien's English; it further suggests the metaphorical splits either of aliens in an English-speaking world or of the English language dubbing and animating an alien world. While such alien performances are largely ventriloquized by native writers in the name of aliens, most blatant of which are Western Orientalism and ethnic self-Orientalism, there were and still are exceptional nonnative writers in Anglo-American tongues, as a direct consequence of Eastern diasporas to the nineteenth-century British Empire and then to the twentieth-century U.S. Empire. These writers include Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Jerzy Kosinski, Kazuo Ishiguro, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, and Ha Jin, who all seem to share a predicament: the strange English tongue they belabor to host in an effort to feel at home in the Anglo-American host culture as well as in their own bodies deemed foreign bodies. Wherever one hails from, an alien with a tongue graft is doomed to be either a tragic outcast or a pathetic clown, caught between two irreconcilable languages and cultures, searching for an identity in English yet haunted by a phantom tongue pain. The book's methodology fuses the scholarly with the poetic, a montage that springs from the very nature of diaspora, which is as much about rational decisions of relocation as, put simply, feelings. The heart of diaspora, breaking like a cracked voice, is resealed by the head, making both stronger-until another thin line opens up. Only through this double helix of head and heart, thinking and feeling, can one hope to map the DNA of diaspora. Such an unorthodox melange balances the tongue as a cultural expression from the body and the tongue as a visceral reaction of the body. Any potential crack amid the superstructure of global English and its underside of alien tongues promises discovery of a new world, which has always been there. Alienglish hence arrays itself on a spectrum from the English's Alien to the Alien's English, from white representations of the Other to aliens' self-representations. The usual Orientalist suspects of Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and Gilbert and Sullivan swell to capture affectless aliens from sci-fi, Stieg Larsson, and Lian Hearn. The book then turns to images of Shanghai and Macau, Asian Canadian Joy Kogawa and Evelyn Lau, and the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho. It concludes with an examination of the new China hands (Ha Jin, et al.) and the global media's search for the sublime. The title of this book Alienglish appropriately conveys the uniqueness of this book, which will be a useful contribution to Asian and Asian American studies, comparative literature, diaspora studies, film studies, popular culture, and world literature.

This edited collection describes and discusses the advances of African Americans since the 1960s in the context of political philosophy, specifically, utilitarian liberalism revisited as 1980s and 1990s conservatism. Identifying the basic assumptions of utilitarian liberalism with respect to governance and representation, it uses these constructs to explain public policy outcomes in African-American communities. The three core themes are: governance and the role of the state; African American responses and strategies for empowerment; and policy adjustments of the state. It is a major contribution to the discourse on a problem central to contemporary public policy debate: the appropriate role of government in the regulation of public and private behavior to achieve a balance between freedom and justice.

Frontiers of Citizenship is an engagingly-written, innovative history of Brazil's black and indigenous people that redefines our understanding of slavery, citizenship, and the origins of Brazil's 'racial democracy'. Through groundbreaking archival research that brings the stories of slaves, Indians, and settlers to life, Yuko Miki challenges the widespread idea that Brazilian Indians 'disappeared' during the colonial era, paving the way for the birth of Latin America's largest black nation. Focusing on the postcolonial settlement of the Atlantic frontier and Rio de Janeiro, Miki argues that the exclusion and inequality of indigenous and African-descended people became embedded in the very construction of Brazil's remarkably inclusive nationhood. She demonstrates that to understand the full scope of central themes in Latin American history - race and national identity, unequal citizenship, popular politics, and slavery and abolition - one must engage the histories of both the African diaspora and the indigenous Americas.

Koreans have been immigrating to the United States via Hawaii for over a hundred years, although the greatest influx to the mainland began after 1965, making Koreans one of the most recent ethnic groups in the United States. The intimate socio-political links between the United States and the Korean peninsula after World War II also contributes to the ideas and ideals of what it means to be Korean in the United States. As with many people with immigrant background, young people of Korean descent residing in the United States try to understand their ethnic identities through their families, peers, and communities, and many of these journeys involve participating in cultural activities that include traditional dance, song, and other such performance activities. This study is the culmination of a four-year ethnographic research project on the cultural practices of a group of Koreans in the United States pursuing the traditional Korean cultural art form of pungmul in exploring their ethnic identities. Through the accesses and opportunities afforded to the members of Mae-ari Korean Cultural Troupe by the national and transnational networks with other people of Korean descent, these young people begin to understand themselves as "Korean" while teaching and learning traditional Korean cultural practices in performances, workshops, and everyday interactions with each other. Most studies about Asian Americans focus on the immigration challenges, or the conflicts and differences between generations. While these are important issues that affect the lives of Asian Americans, it is also valuable to focus on how new cultural identities are formed in the attempt to hold on to the traditions of theimmigrant homeland . This research pays close attention to how young people understand their identities through cultural practices, regardless of generational differences. The focus is on collective meaning-making about ethnic identity across immigration statuses and generations. In investigating their ways of being, author Sonya Gwak pays close attention to the semiotic processes within the group that aid in creating and cultivating notions of ethnic identity, especially in the ways in which the notion of culture becomes indelibly linked with "things" within and across the sites. Dr. Gwak also explores the pedagogical processes within the group regarding how cultures are objectified and transformed into tools of teaching and learning. Finally, the study also reveals how people understand their ethnic identities through direct and active engagement with, experience of, and expression of "cultural objects." By looking at the multiple forms of expressing ethnic identity, this study shows how the young people in Mae-ari locate themselves within the time and space of Korean history, Korean American history, activism, performing arts, and tradition. This study argues that ethnic identity formation is a process that is rooted in cultural practices contextualized in social, political, and cultural histories. This book advances the field of ethnic and immigrant studies by offering a new framework for understanding the multiple ways in which young people make sense of their identities. Be(com)ing Korean in the United States is an important book for all collections in Asian American studies, as well as ethnic and immigrant studies.

Minas Gerais is a state in southeastern Brazil deeply connected to the nation's slave past and home to many traditions related to the African diaspora. Addressing a wide range of traditions helping to define the region, ethnomusicologist Jonathon Grasse examines the complexity of Minas Gerais by exploring the intersections of its history, music, and culture. Instruments, genres, social functions, and historical accounts are woven together to form a tapestry revealing a cultural territory's development. The deep pool of Brazilian scholarship referenced in the book, with original translations by the author, cites over two hundred Portuguese-language publications focusing on Minas Gerais. This research was augmented by fieldwork, observations, and interviews completed over a twenty-five-year period and includes original photographs, many taken by the author. Hearing Brazil: Music and Histories in Minas Gerais surveys the colonial past, the vast hinterland countryside, and the modern, twenty-first-century state capital of Belo Horizonte, the metropolitan region of which is today home to over six million. Diverse legacies are examined, including an Afro-Brazilian heritage, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liturgical music of the region's "Minas Baroque," the instrument known as the viola, a musical profile of Belo Horizonte, and a study of the regionalist themes developed by the popular music collective the Clube da Esquina (Corner Club) led by Milton Nascimento with roots in the 1960s. Hearing Brazil champions the notion that Brazil's unique role in the world is further illustrated by regionalist studies presenting details of musical culture.

Michele Reid-Vazquez reveals the untold story of the strategies of negotia-tion used by free blacks in the aftermath of the "Year of the Lash"--a wave of repression in Cuba that had great implications for the Atlantic World in the next two decades.

At dawn on June 29, 1844, a firing squad in Havana executed ten accused ringleaders of the Conspiracy of La Escalera, an alleged plot to abolish slavery and colonial rule in Cuba. The condemned men represented prominent members of Cuba's free community of African descent, including the acclaimed poet Placido (Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes). In an effort to foster a white majority and curtail black rebellion, Spanish colonial authorities also banished, imprisoned, and exiled hundreds of free blacks, dismantled the militia of color, and accelerated white immigration projects.

Scholars have debated the existence of the Conspiracy of La Escalera for over a century, yet little is known about how those targeted by the violence responded. Drawing on archival material from Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, Reid-Vazquez provides a critical window into under-standing how free people of color challenged colonial policies of terror and pursued justice on their own terms using formal and extralegal methods. Whether rooted in Cuba or cast into the Atlantic World, free men and women of African descent stretched and broke colonial expectations of their codes of conduct locally and in exile. Their actions underscored how black agency, albeit fragmented, worked to destabilize repression's impact.

Following the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans organized a movement--distinct from the white Populist movement--in the South and parts of the Midwest for economic and political reform: Black Populism. Between 1886 and 1898, tens of thousands of black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers created their own organizations and tactics primarily under black leadership.

As Black Populism grew as a regional force, it met fierce resistance from the Southern Democrats and constituent white planters and local merchants. African Americans carried out a wide range of activities in this hostile environment. They established farming exchanges and cooperatives; raised money for schools; published newspapers; lobbied for better agrarian legislation; mounted boycotts against agricultural trusts and business monopolies; carried out strikes for better wages; protested the convict lease system, segregated coach boxes, and lynching; demanded black jurors in cases involving black defendants; promoted local political reforms and federal supervision of elections; and ran independent and fusion campaigns.

Growing out of the networks established by black churches and fraternal organizations, Black Populism found further expression in the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the southern branch of the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, the Farmers Union, and the Colored Farmers Alliance. In the early 1890s African Americans, together with their white counterparts, launched the People's Party and ran fusion campaigns with the Republican Party. By the turn of the century, Black Populism had been crushed by relentless attack, hostile propaganda, and targeted assassinations of leaders and foot soldiers of the movement. The movement's legacy remains, though, as the largest independent black political movement until the rise of the modern civil rights movement.